February 2010

Should companies have social media policies? And how much should they monitor employees’ e-mails, instant messages, Facebook updates and tweets?

Facebook has been in the news recently with revelations of pornographic and offensive material being posted on tribute pages for young people who have died. This prompted Queensland Premier Anna Bligh to write to Facebook asking it to do something. But with nearly 400 million users, expecting Facebook to control content is like expecting Australia Post to stop people writing offensive letters. The case however, tells us that people need to behave on social networking sites. The same goes for email. There is no shortage of stories about people who get in trouble for sloppy email, just as there are lots of tales about people who screw up using Facebook and Twitter. You might be a hero with Mafia Wars and Farmville, but are you aware of some of the security risks on social networking sites? As reported here, mistakes can include everything from inadvertently passing on your password to giving out too much information. At the same time, organisations are using technology to intrude on people’s privacy. Hence the creepy reports about a US school monitoring a student at home through a webcam installed on his laptop. Which raises some questions. When technology is blurring lines between work and non-work, how do companies and organisations set boundaries to stop people screwing up?

What’s the future of the land line? Is it going the way of the pay phone, or for that matter, the buggy whip?

Telstra’s results certainly raise that question. Telstra reported a 3.3 per cent slip in profit to $1.85 billion. The worse-than-expected first-half profit coincides with its surprise at the number of customers turning from fixed-line telephones. More people are using mobile phones instead of land lines. And it’s not just for voice calls either but for text messages and emails. Telstra says voice traffic is down across all categories - local, long distance, international and fixed to mobile. The biggest drop was in the local call category. Local call revenue is down almost 13 per cent. Indeed, Telstra customers are now making five less local calls to what they did just a year ago. What’s more, people moving into new digs save on the rentals and don’t have landlines. The mobile will do. There is a generation of people out there who will never have landlines. What are the pros and cons of land lines? Is the fixed line phone dead? Or should people pay more for using it?

Workplace relations is back in the news with opposition leader Tony Abbott saying he wants to relax unfair dismissal laws for small businesses and reintroduce statutory non-union contracts if he wins the election.

Who’d have thunk it? Three years after the Rudd Government was elected on the back of community concern over WorkChoices, the issue has come back. WorkChoices might be dead but this is its ghost. Probably, that was on the cards after Tony Abbott ousted Malcolm Turnbull. Abbott sees WorkChoices as sound Coalition policy but he says it just went overboard initially by ditching a safety net and no disadvantage test. Still, Rudd’s Fair Work Act does have its critics and problems. How does the public feel about the issue being dredged up again?

Talk to anyone who works in an office, and sooner or later, the conversation turns to office peeves, stuff that annoys people the most.

They talk about everything, from computers that keep breaking down to the diva sitting near them. Some talk about the office grouch, others will go into gruesome detail about the mess people leave in the kitchen or toilet. And some talk about bad management and management jargon. So what are the biggest office peeves?

Consider for example this University of Texas list of lawyers who went on to do other things. It includes writers like Franz Kafka and Jules Verne, politicians like Fidel Castro, Mahatma Ghandi and Vladimir Lenin, and composers like Hoagy Carmichael and Peter Tchaikovsky. Jerry Springer started out as a politician, Kevin Rudd was a bureaucrat and Barack Obama was community organiser before going into law school. Best selling author John Grisham started out as a lawyer. Actor Will Smith, star of Men in Black and Seven Pounds is considering going into politics, according to this report.

I have always had a dream of becoming a full time musician but then, I know I would miss writing. So it’s not an easy choice and in any case, you know what they say about the grass always being greener. Why do people change careers? And how do you know when it’s time to do it?

Like rape or sexual assault, bullying is about control, domination and power. I have blogged about this issue here and here. The problem is not going away and if anything, there’s enough going on to suggest it might even be getting worse.

You would have to have a heart of cold steel not to be moved by last week’s story about Brodie Panlock who died in 2006 when she jumped from a building after being constantly bullied and humiliated while working as waitress and sandwich hand. She was called fat, stupid, ugly and a whore. She had rat poison put in her handbag, and fish oil poured on her hair and clothes. The thing that really struck me about this case was the pack mentality where ordinary men turned into a pack of wolves. In the end, they were fined. Still, you read that and wonder what drives people to bully someone to death. And in this day and age, why is it still happening?

Property prices are soaring and housing is becoming more and more unaffordable. People are being shut out of the housing market and for many, the great Australian dream of owning a home has become a joke. Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that the price of houses rose more in the December quarter than at any other time in 2009. At the same time, a Housing Industry Association survey found that new home sales fell by 4.16 per cent in December. And it will keep going . With unemployment trending down, the National Australia Bank says property prices will keep going up.

One of the most interesting areas to watch is the development of food trends. I know I am dating myself but I am old enough to remember when I had my first mango and my first avocado. I remember as a teenager busting up with a surfy girlfriend when I tried introducing her to Lebanese food, something she had never had seen before. She went on to marry a bogan or three. How times change.

The fascinating part is that these trends keep changing. As society shifts and as the economy changes, new trends will emerge. One of the big trends last year, with the economic downturn, was fewer people going to swanky and expensive restaurants and more people entertaining at home. So what are the ones we should watch out for in 2010?

One of the big conversation starters last week was the news report about Macquarie banker David Kiely who was caught looking at half naked photos of model Miranda Kerr on his computer during a TV live cross.

Now, I am not going to get judgemental here. If that’s the sort of stuff people get off on, so be it. For me, it’s a waste of time but maybe I just lead a sheltered life. Still, what’s really interesting about this story is the way it shows how technology has crept into our lives and blurred the lines between work and pleasure. That might explain why the incident generated headlines around the world and became a YouTube hit. The controversy over something deemed to be “inappropriate” also got me wondering about the new moralism sweeping society, something I blogged about last year. I mean, does anyone really care? Still, it raises issues for companies. How do they manage these sorts of incidents, if they’re that common? And how does it affect the people working around you, particularly in an open plan office?

Open plan offices have their own set of specific problems. It’s something I have blogged about here.But with the growth of open plan, office etiquette has never been as important as it is now. As Nicole Richardson writes in the MyCareer section, lack of space makes office etiquette a priority. “Space comes at such a premium that tempers can fray when an untidy colleague's pile of mess seeps across the boundary to an adjoining workstation. Turf wars spring to life when a corner desk becomes available. Working in such close proximity to each other in a world without privacy brings countless challenges to office etiquette. Where do you look when you've just caught your supervisor looking for a new job online? Is there anything that can be done about the resident loud talkers, the coffee slurpers and the slackers who perch interminably upon the edge of your desk for a chat every time they pass by? How much boom-boom bass should you endure from Mr iPod next door before you ask him to turn it down? Yet these are minor dilemmas when compared with the contentious issue of heating and cooling in an open-plan office.’’

So what are the rules of office etiquette in today’s workplace? Are there special rules?

Since the end of last year, it’s been fascinating to watch the debate over the climate hacking and glacier calculation affairs.

For those who haven’t been following it, the first incident was called “climategate” where a hacker accessed a number of files and emails at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, one of the most respected institutions in the world conducting climate science analysis. And then there was glaciergate where UN climate researchers admitted they had grossly overestimated the chances that the Himalayas' glaciers would soon disappear as a result of global warming. All this has been ammunition for sceptics and lobbyists who say our planet is not affected by mankind's profligate burning of fossil fuel. More to the point, it raises questions about the role of science and climate change policies.

Fancy reading a book on a computer? Can you really see people buying hard copy newspapers in 20 years time? The iPad is significant because it could be another development in the way we will manage our leisure time, and the way we gather information. Are we looking at the death of print?

Leon Gettler is a contributor to The Age, specialising on management issues. His interests include business ethics, corporate governance and the intricacies of the US Sarbanes-Oxley ruling. He is the author of two books, including Organisations Behaving Badly: A Greek tragedy of corporate pathology, which focuses on the forces that lead smart executives to make dumb decisions.

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